Wagner and Wagnerism
This week: a conversation about the operas of Richard Wagner and their legacy, with our guide, the New Yorker’s Alex Ross. Hear it at 2 pm today, or anytime at our website.
Finally, Alex Ross’s colossal book on Richard Wagner’s legacy is here. Wagnerism is the title, and it’s about a contradictory tradition that started with the composer’s dramatic intensity. Wagner brought to nineteenth-century audiences the promise of gesamtkunstwerk, a total experience of art that combined music and drama, and he argued for art that might speak to some collective desire of the “volk,” a culturally linked community. He contributed to all kinds of historical developments, from creative breakthroughs to nationalist hate. (Here’s what the composer Steve Reich has had to say about it.)
Ross traces Wagnerism through fin-de-siècle decadence, modernist experimentation in theatre and literature, and an array of political cultures. One movement looms largest in this history: Wagner, an anti-Semitic nationalist, notoriously inspired Adolf Hitler. Ross says on our show:
The one thing that everyone knows about Wagner today is that he was Hitler’s favorite composer, that he was somehow a herald of Nazism. And that is true. But it’s not the whole truth about Wagner. And so this is really one driving reason behind this book.
Wagner’s operas contain and suggest so much that can’t fit into a single narrow political reading, can’t be reduced solely to Hitler’s sense of the music. Ross points out the dynamic politics of Wagnerism:
He was such an important example for German extreme nationalism and anti-Semitism. But he who was also an enormous influence on the left in a very, very different, very contradictory way. Well into the twentieth century, Wagner was still considered a figurehead of the left, as a progressive, even as a democrat. And you find that influence in Bolshevik Russia, where Wagner is being prized as a hero of proletarian culture after 1917. And, you know, this is also a valid interpretation of Wagner.
So I think we can’t let Wagner be captured completely by the right wing. I think it actually gives too much credit to Hitler. It gives Hitler a kind of posthumous victory to let him have sole possession of this composer who had so many contradictory elements. He hated militarism, actually, toward the end of his life. He was never a fan of the organized state in any form. There was something very anti-totalitarian about his political thinking.
Still, it’s true that these operas, by the writer of a widely known hate tract, inspired the Nazi leader. Ross emphasizes that you can’t arrive at any easy, comfortable understanding of Wagner, or any art:
We should always be wary. We should always be wary of art, any kind of art, because it can deceive us. It can be used for bad ends. And so I think this is really the theme that I come back to very strongly at the end of the book. It’s always risky to idealize art. And I think when we think about music and literature and the visual arts, we need to get away from this idealization, from this idea that that art takes us to a pure, higher ideal sphere. Because when we let it take us away from reality, then we can become numb to what is surrounding us. And so it can it can become a force of illusion. It can be used as a weapon. It can be used as a weapon of mass destruction.
You might go to a movie, or the opera, to be transported, to forget the world for a moment. Wagner’s operas have tantalized audiences with their lure of intoxicating art, in which music leads to drama leads to music, in which sight and sound merge in a way that can overwhelm and transport. But Wagnerism’s tortuous history reminds us that even the most intense art has entanglements with the material world, including in the worst ways. Ross says:
I don’t have any argument with people who say, “I just can’t deal with this, this composer.” You know, I respect that. I’m not really urging people to go out and listen to Wagner and saying this is something that you have to listen to. I respect that resistance. But I do think it’s worth at least making an attempt at coming to terms with this composer because he really was one of the greatest theater artists in cultural history.
Consider: Wagner’s Operas
Where to start with Wagner’s operas? Alex Ross’s website lists his favorite recordings, including some on DVD. Here’s his recommended Tannhäuser, with Georg Solti conducting:
Ross’s website also has an audio-visual guide to Wagner to accompany the book, here.
Read: À Rebours
Ross wasn’t always intrigued by Wagner’s music. He tells us:
Wagner just didn’t make any sense to me for a long time. I remember long-playing records of Lohengrin, and putting them on for a few minutes, and just feeling baffled and a little sick to my stomach. It was this music that kind of dribbled from one chord to another. It lacked kind of clear demarcation.
His way into Wagner’s music wasn’t so much the music itself, then; it was the cultural world that carried Wagnerian echoes.
By my college years, I was getting very interested in the fin de siècle, the turn of the last century, this amazing, decadent, often rather unsettling and chilling period of cultural and political history from the end of the 19th century into the early 20th.
In fin de siècle Europe, swelling consumerist desire, imaginative rethinking of stale bourgeois conventions, and a growing entertainment culture drove a new thirst for thrill, for the sort of novelty that art could provide. Art became a vehicle for lurid, transgressive, possibly unhealthy imaginative/sensory experience. This was decadent art, rich with the excess of consumer capitalism and the decay of bloated empires, excess that prompted continual imaginative flight into the dimension of Jekyll and Hyde, Dracula, and Dorian Gray.
The classic novel that spoke to fin-de-siècle decadence is Joris-Karl Huysman’s À Rebours (1884) or “Against Nature. It’s an account of an aristocratic character’s plunge into neurotic, obsessive pursuit of stimuli. This plunge takes that character, De Esseintes, into Wagnerian music that suggests deliciously losing control to art, and into poetry that Wagnerianly turns a narrative into language’s music.
To Des Esseintes, the prose poem represented the concrete juice of literature, the essential oil of art.
That succulence, developed and concentrated into a drop, already existed in Baudelaire and in those poems of Mallarmé which he read with such deep joy.
When he had closed his anthology, Des Esseintes told himself that his books which had ended on this last book, would probably never have anything added to it.
In fact, the decadence of a literature, irreparably affected in its organism, enfeebled by old ideas, exhausted by excesses of syntax, sensitive only to the curiosities which make sick persons feverish, and yet intent upon expressing everything in its decline, eager to repair all the omissions of enjoyment, to bequeath the most subtle memories of grief in its death bed, was incarnate in Mallarmé, in the most perfect exquisite manner imaginable.
Des Esseintes, decadent seeker of such dark bliss, finds in Wagner another way to access perfect, encompassing artistic thrill:
[H]e was certain that there was not one single scene, not even a phrase of one of the operas of the amazing Wagner which could with impunity be detached from its whole.The fragments, cut and served on the plate of a concert, lost all significance and remained senseless, since (like the chapters of a book, completing each other and moving to an inevitable conclusion) Wagner’s melodies were necessary to sketch the characters, to incarnate their thoughts and to express their apparent or secret motives. He knew that their ingenious and persistent returns were understood only by the auditors who followed the subject from the beginning and gradually beheld the characters in relief, in a setting from which they could not be removed without dying, like branches torn from a tree.
Des Esseintes recognizes in Wagner something Ross, too, sees: Wagner is a theater artist above all else. But there’s also no perfect experience of art, at last, for the Wagnerite Des Esseintes. His insatiable quest for rarified, ideal art experience isolates him. “The waves of human mediocrity rise to the sky and they will engulf the refuge whose dams I open,” he muses at the close of the novel. It’s an early expression of art that agitates more than it advances us into some pure ecstasy, art that challenges convention and rejects the familiar — something like a modernist ideal.
Listen: Mahler
Musical influences of Wagner are everywhere, including the work of Gustav Mahler. His first symphony brings together folk music and natural grandeur, in a way that rewrites and revises Wagnerian tendencies. Here’s the New York Philharmonic, performing the first symphony:
And here’s Alex Ross’s list of his favorite recordings of Mahler’s symphonies:
№1: Rafael Kubelík, Bavarian Radio Symphony (DG)
№2: Simon Rattle, City of Birmingham Symphony (EMI)
№3: Jascha Horenstein, London Symphony (Unicorn) or Claudio Abbado, Berlin Philharmonic (DG)
№4: Iván Fischer, Budapest Festival Orchestra (Channel Classics)
№5: Leonard Bernstein, Vienna Philharmonic (DG)
№6: Pierre Boulez, Vienna Philharmonic (DG)
№7: Michael Tilson Thomas, London Symphony (BMG)
№8: Horenstein, London Symphony, 1959 (BBC Legends)
№9: Bernstein, Berlin Philharmonic, 1979 (DG)
№10: Rattle, Berlin Philharmonic (EMI)
Read: The Waves
Ross traces Wagnerism beyond the decadent writers like Huysmans and into the twentieth century. Virginia Woolf wrote under the influence of Wagner, for instance. “Wagner did have an important effect on Woolf,” Ross says on our show.
I think Wagner’s endless melody, this texture that goes on and on, this pointed toward the stream of consciousness, toward the interior monologue, which is obviously such an important part of Virginia Woolf’s mature work.
In The Waves, Woolf created a related, musical sort of character, a kind of consciousness evoked through language that blurs things from one character to another, as Tristan blurs into Isolde in Wagner’s opera. From The Waves:
[M]y character is in part made of the stimulus which other people provide, and is not mine, as yours are. There is some fatal streak, some wandering and irregular vein of silver, weakening it . . . I am made and remade continually. Different people draw different words from me.”
Support us on Patreon and Learn about a Huge Owl
Our Patreon patrons can find the growing library of conversations Adam Colman’s been recording about writing and solitude during the pandemic. This week, the conversation is with Jonathan Slaght, whose book about encounters with the world’s largest owl in Primorye, in eastern Russia, just made it onto the longlist for the National Book Award. Find the conversation at patreon.com/radioopensource.
And here’s a picture of the species of fish owl in question; they can grow to around three feet in height, and they eat salmon.
This week’s ephemeral library
Jill Lepore on Ruth Bader Ginsburg. A Civil War-era struggle against the Supreme Court. Facebook versus democracy. Jeremy Corbyn on Allende and the international left. Raise a glass to The New Yorker’s Roger Angell on his 100th birthday.
Stay safe and sane this week, folks. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there.
The OS Valkyries.
